Invalid Lives

Abstract Within the enclaves of the English colonies, health resorts broke down social barriers, bringing together heterogeneous collections of people, bonded by the common factor of their illness. This chapter explores a range of those lives, their intersections, and experiences as invalids, from those who suffered from the rather questionable illness of ‘clergyman’s throat’, to those who were terminally ill and died in the resort. Lives explored include Baptist minister Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the ‘Prince of Preachers’, who spent around twenty winters in Mentone; the botanist and entomologist, John Traherne Moggridge; and the aesthete Aubrey Beardsley, who spent his last months in the resort. Thomas Carlyle arrived to try and conquer his grief on the death of his wife, and John Addington Symonds came close to complete breakdown as he battled with his sexuality in the hills around Mentone, while feminist Olive Schreiner, there for her nerves and asthma, sought to write her book on ‘Sex Growth’. The chapter extends outwards to look at Edward Lear’s life in neighbouring San Remo, and George MacDonald in Bordighera. American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson and John Richard Green, ‘Historian of the English People’, both chronicled life in Mentone. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic essay on invalid life, ‘Ordered South’, and an exploration of why a winter cure in snowy Alps led to the displacement of Mentone as the key resort for tuberculosis.